Читать книгу A Companion to Medical Anthropology онлайн
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The political economic systems that have resulted from unconstrained capitalism and global free market policies married to a scientific positivism whose advocates thought they would save the world have become systems of structural violence (Galtung 1969) that are especially damaging to the poor and marginalized peoples of the planet. As Farmer (2003:1) indicates, structural violence refers to “a host of offenses against human dignity [including]: extreme and relative poverty, social inequalities ranging from racism to gender inequality, and the more spectacular forms of violence that are uncontested human rights abuses….” Medical anthropologists waver between people-centered approaches that include individual experiences and collective realities of lived marginalization and “social suffering” (Biehl and Petryna 2013; Kleinman et al. 1997), and infrastructures of violence, historical trauma, and systems of oppression. As Langer (1996:53) asserts, “We need a special kind of portraiture [and a special language] to sketch the anguish of people who have no agency in their fate because their enemy is not a discernible antagonist, but a ruthless racial ideology, an uncontrollable virus, or, more recently, a shell from a distant hillside exploding amid unsuspecting victims in a hospital or market square.”